ISIS fighters battled Syrian insurgents in the northwestern province of Idlib on Friday, a monitoring group and a rebel commander said, accusing pro-government forces of opening a corridor for the militants to reach the region. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said government forces had allowed ISIS fighters to leave a besieged pocket of territory at the intersection of Aleppo, Idlib and Hama provinces, and then go to southern Idlib. A military news outlet run by Lebanon’s Hezbollah ...

The Syrian army has deployed new air defenses and anti-aircraft missiles to frontlines in the Aleppo and Idlib areas, a commander in the military alliance fighting in support of President Bashar al-Assad said on Monday. "The Syrian army calls up new air defenses and anti-aircraft missiles to areas on the frontlines with the militants in the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib," the commander told Reuters. "They cover the air space of the Syrian north."

Warplanes have hit a convoy of civilians fleeing along a major Syrian highway, rescuers and a witness said on Saturday. It took place in an area where Syrian and Iranian-backed troops were pushing, with air cover, towards a rebel-held town in northwestern Idlib province, they said. Syrian soldiers and Iranian-backed militiamen were now around 12 km from Saraqeb, advancing towards the Damascus-Aleppo highway under cover of heavy Russian air strikes, two opposition sources said. Rescuers said ...

The King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre has started its campaign on urgent nutritional aid for displaced individuals from Aleppo and Idlib. The relief packages are for those who escaped their homes and reside in make-shift camps. The relief center’s first batch of packages, dispatched on Saturday, Jan. 27, will be delivered to 12,106 individuals. The center aims to expand the size of relief package project extended to the Syrian people through working on numerous projects ...

Assad regime supporters are celebrating the first anniversary of the recapture of Aleppo from opposition groups in December 2016. With the support of Russian air strikes, Assad's troops took control of the city once known as Syria’s commercial capital and one of it’s largest. The city that turned into a divided battleground with rebel forces controlling the east, and government forces in the west, took the lives of thousands of people, mostly civilians. So how did war-torn Aleppo ...

Brigadier general of the Republican Guard and the commander of operations in Deir al-Zor, Issam Zahreddine, was killed in a mine explosion in the Hawija-Sakr area inside the city of Deir al-Zor, according to Syrian media.Zahreddine played a role in the progress made by the Syrian army forces in the city of Deir al-Zor, and the surrounding areas, which reached strategic fields in the city.Zahreddine led army operations against the armed opposition in Homs and Aleppo, before moving to the eastern ...

The worst fighting since the battle for eastern Aleppo last year is raging in several regions of Syria, causing hundreds of civilian casualties, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Thursday. Up to 10 hospitals have been reportedly damaged in the past 10 days, cutting off hundreds of thousands of people from access to health care, the aid agency said in a statement voicing alarm at the situation from Raqqa to Idlib and eastern Ghouta. “For ...

More than 600,000 displaced Syrians have returned to their homes since the beginning of the year, with most of them heading to Aleppo, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration. Between January and the end of July, 602,759 displaced Syrians returned to their homes, many of them citing an improved economic and security situation in the areas they had fled from, IOM said in a statement. A total of 84 percent of those who have returned had taken refuge elsewhere within ...

On the terrace of the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, the owner's widow, Roubina Tashjian, sorted through old photographs of its happier past in a more peaceful Syria. Founded by an Armenian family in 1911, the Baron played host to adventurers, writers, kings, aviators, Bedouin chiefs and presidents until war forced it to close five years ago. Tashjian sees the Baron as part of a Syria that values religious and ethnic diversity, openness to the outside world, culture and respect for the country's great ...

Over 200,000 civilians have fled their homes in Syria around the Islamic State group’s de facto capital of Raqqa since April 1, including over 30,000 displaced just this month as US-backed Syrian fighters try to oust the extremists, a senior UN humanitarian official said Thursday. Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Ursula Mueller told the UN Security Council in a video briefing from Amman, Jordan, that “an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 people remain inside Raqqa city, ...